We think: TIME should have have run the video without the narrative, and let viewers laugh.

Or wince. Or pause, and think about it.

But the commentary is weak, and we believeth that TIME hath protested too much. The video’s observations need to be taken with an entire box of kosher salt, aye, but that much is or should be obvious. TIME‘s apologetic, however, gives the video too much credit, and speaks volumes about – if not the magazine’s editorial sensitivities – their agenda.

And just because the essential argument is pro-CCP spin, it doesn’t mean that each and every point is fundamentally incorrect.

If democracy really needs amateurish puffery to shore it up against a Ministry of Feelgood cum South Park stunt, then it’s in trouble.

The “rise of China” is nothing to fear. But not for the reasons Charles Kenny suggests.

We’re 14-odd years boots-on-the-ground there (still there now), and it is high time that the US (and Americans) have a glance at the Chinese playbook. It is remarkably simple. Here’s an oversimplified peek:

1. The government isn’t responsible for you or your well-being. If you don’t want to starve, you work, hustle, and make things happen. No jobs in your community? Then you go to where they are. “Jobs creation” may or may not be the business of the state, but job acquisition is the individual’s responsibility.

Hardly a day passes when I do not see some newly-opened shop, fruit stand, boutique, or some other entrepreneurial endeavor underway in my second-tier Chinese city — and folks, opening a business in China isn’t exactly easy or turn-key. But it’s funny that the communist (with Chinese characteristics) state keeps the peeps striving for comprehensive economic improvement by *not* having too many iron rice bowls and gratuitous safety-nets. Or safety hammocks. Or futons in Section 8 tenements.

2. Families are imperfect world-wide, each proverbially unhappy in their own way. But by and large, the Chinese still take seriously the idea that the family is a unit. When they have the means (and many work slavishly to have something that approximates the means), planning for the child’s future begins when le petit huangdi is in utero. Youth is still contemplated largely as preparation for adulthood and for all the unpleasantness and responsibilities that come with it.

In over a decade in China, I have yet to meet or even hear of a family in which the parents took the view that, at 18, Junior starts paying rent or he hits the bricks.

Let’s by all means have, make room for, and (in case it matters) even celebrate the diversity of American families. But American parents need to shrug-off all the humanist psychology nonsense that got us to the point where experts in the behavioural sciences now encourage parents to make their children active-stakeholders in their own childhood. Responsible, reasonably-ambitious adults are actively crafted and thoughtfully cultivated by parents, and not by public schools, society, or the community — although to really eff’ up a child it takes a village.

3. China’s modern foreign policy seems largely if not wholly free from any kind of ideological evangelism, and they keep most of their aid expenditures domestic. What concepts!

4. If you overstay your visa in China, and the PSB nabs you, you’re gone. Done. Deported. No hearing, no trial. Gone. If you stay under the radar, and then one day decide to fly outwith the motherland, customs nabs you at the airport, and then fines and/or imposes a custodial sentence upon you. And good luck getting another entry visa. Never mind that China is not, historically, a nation of immigrants, or a melting pot. Immigration policies and rules pursuant to the entry and residency of aliens matter in China.

Why they wouldn’t matter in any sovereign state that even bothers to have and to maintain borders is more of a mystery than the actual contents of hualvshui, or why some US military personnel drive KIAs. Being in a country illegally is a crime, and law enforcement deals with criminal behaviours. Why American citizens – within and outwith the Beltway – should be wringing their hands about whether or not it is appropriate for LEOs to apprehend trespassers is just bizarre.

5. Read an American broadsheet or periodical, and an article about China focuses on the Chinese — generally, how thin the ice is upon which they dance, or how terrible the government is which they are forced bravely to suffer. What does much of Chinese media report on, when covering news of the world? The lives and fates and fortunes of overseas Chinese, mainly.

It’s neo-colonialism, folks, and Chinese diaspora planet-wide have their own mini-assemblies, and leadership structures, and are represented as a unit by the CCPCC. Rubberneck they do, of course — foreigners and their funny ways make the pages (and i-pages, and e-pages) in China, for sure. But when was the last time CNN (or Fox) did news items about the American expat communities in Beijing, or Shanghai, or Chengdu? To read The New York Times‘ China-reporting, you’d think there weren’t any real Americans living and working and having settled lives in China — and enjoying them. Exception: One of the Americans is married to a Chinese, and the couple is (a) wealthy, fashionable, and progressive, and have just produced a play, film, or concert, or just redecorated their loft, or, (b) the American is trying to free Tibet.

These respective biases (“spins”) speak volumes about (inter alia) the priorities of the respective nations, and their peoples.

We could continue this thread for pages, but we’ll end here. For now.

And the take-away?

Time spent citing and complaining about China’s “human rights” record, etc., – or: time congratulating ourselves for The American Way of Life – is time that could be better spent learning about what China is doing well, and doing right.

Is it really to be wondered at if a younger generation of Chinese – if only because they are worried to death about competing for jobs and other opportunities with better-educated (and probably: better-fed) peers from the big cities – are not rabidly enthusiastic about carrying into the future the traditions of the village from which they are trying desperately to escape? And just in case the Chinese government is sometimes doing too little too late to preserve every oddball mico-folkway — well,…so what?

When rural development proceeds too slowly, people complain. Never mind the fact that there’s no way to define or qualify too slowly, except from the point of view of those with specific developmental-outcome expectations. People complain too, of course, when the fazhan juggernaut seems to clip along too quickly — development being too quick only when it seems insufficiently developmental, or when the pace of development seems unsustainable, or when change extends to things that some would prefer unchanged.

China, it seems, can’t get a break.

Allow, though, that there are too few grassroots stewards of China’s various and manifold intangible cultural heritage. Why might that be the case?

One reason is that many rural parents leave their child in the countryside with the grandparents while they strike-out to slave-away for barely a living wage in one of China’s larger cities. When the landscape is calories, the passing-down of some traditions has a way of becoming deprioritised. This has led some observers to bemoan the circumstances that give rise to that situation, and these include: underdevelopment in the outback. Rural underdevelopment then leads to complaints about disparities in education, access to healthcare, access to the internet, etc., between rural children and urban children. And every now and then one hears or reads of worries about the consequences of children being raised by semi-literate, geriatric, superstitious, and sometimes downright rascally yokels. Not everyone in the countryside, after all, is a treasure-trove of lore, wisdom, and tradition.

UNESCO most of the time seems positively chuffed about China’s interest in ethno-arcana. But if the local folkways were creepy, mired in a local subculture’s ugly past, or happen not to be photogenic or a good platforms for tourism initiatives, then people would complain about the consequences to Chinese society (and humanity generally) of a retrograde demi-demographic passing-on to a new generation the rot from antiquity.

Again, China can’t win.

Mr Johnson’s article was not an unenjoyable read; but as usual with The New York Times, it is not free from the tincture of that kind of editorial craftsmanship that is roughly the same hue as propaganda, and is very characteristic of Times China-reporting: the government is evil, one-dimensional, and myopic; the people are fascinating, wonderful, and victims of their government. For example, Mr Johnson states that

Rapid urbanization means village life, the bedrock of Chinese culture, is rapidly disappearing, and with it, traditions and history.

We disagree. If Chinese culture (which aspect of Chinese culture, exactly?) has a “bedrock” (and we’re not sure it really makes sense to say that it has one), it is the family. Families are what make villages “villages”. And while a village might be home to a few families who maintain some traditional art form, or some craft local to some village, the art form or the craft is the preserve of the families — or more accurately: of some families, special or arbitrary connections with the borders of the village notwithstanding. Upturning, overturning, or gentrifying the Chinese countryside is unlikely to have zero effect on either the maintenance or the transmission of some customs, traditions, and folkways; but the death of the village should not mortify a tradition any more than it would mortify a family. Mr Johnson, therefore, has regrettably overstated the situation.

Urban and rural family units – in China and elsewhere, and perhaps especially in the developing-world – face very different kinds of difficulties, even as these appear against a backdrop of broadly similar challenges. There’s no denying that the dynamics of both kinds of families are changing. But if some rural residents are sometimes the repositories of (among other things) some kinds of unique, hyperlocal traditions, then surely it is for them to decide whether or not to make it a priority for younger family members to be schooled in those traditions. (We believe the apposite word here is ‘autonomy’.) Remember, too, that in some cases these traditions would take years to learn, and a lifetime to master.

The opportunity costs of making time for the proper preservation of some of these arts, crafts, and traditions (and perhaps the word ‘traditions’ does not properly belong in this mix) are generally too great for the hardscrabble Chinese peasant-turned-itinerant labourer; and while we’re not calling for a new smashing of “the four olds”, we do not feel he same sense of either tragedy or emergency that Mr Johnson seems to feel.

As to why there is often insufficient time (or interest) for grassroots, organic preservation of at least some folkways, Mr Johnson – like the rest of us – knows the answer:

The universal allures of modern life — computers, movies, television — have siphoned young people away from traditional pursuits. But the physical fabric of the performers’ lives has also been destroyed.

Assuming that all traditions and cultural folkways have some sort of intrinsic value,* public support for and assistance with preservation efforts might be very welcomed, on principle alone. But it is worth pausing for a moment to consider that were Beijing to insist that village children must and will learn their local folkways, and that some of those children must and will become masters of them (for the sake of Chinese culture; for the sake of human world heritage), The New York Times would lead the chorus of hue and cry. Development is a zero-sum game.

And as for the “physical fabric” of performers’ lives being “destroyed”, that’s pure, mischievous poppycock.** But there had to be a way to blame the government for something — otherwise, the entire point of Mr Johnson’s article is: China’s rural young would rather play Xbox and waste time on Weixin than learn how to sing in a pitch that sounds like a cat being strangled.

Mr Johnson concludes by referencing the mystery golf course, construction of which was at one point cited as the reason for the displacement/relocation of the villagers and/or the demise of the village:

Strangely, however, the golf course has never been built, and the village still lies in ruins. No one here can figure out if this is because the development was illegal, or perhaps part of a corrupt land deal that is under investigation. Such information is not public, so villagers can only speculate. Mostly, they try to forget.

But the teasing allusions to the futility of speculation, and the strong intimations of something conspiratorial or dodgy going on with the land, are misleading — though we are in no position to state whether the allusions and intimations were intended to be. Informed readers will and should know that the golf boom/bubble was for a time a favourite with both the broadsheets and other periodical literature, and there’s nothing odd at all about either development of a golf course being summarily halted, or the details of land-deals being nondisclosed.

There are plenty of educated, culturally-astute, patriotic, wealthy Chinese, both in China and overseas, who are better placed than The Ford Foundation to spearhead and realize efforts to preserve both the gold and the dross of China’s rural traditions. When preservation of Chinese rural traditions matters more to enough Chinese, then there will very likely be more preservation.

So what is this article about then, really?

Nothing of any real importance to anyone — except for China-writers and deep-pocketed foundations.

——-

* There is no such thing as “intrinsic value”. All value is relational, and every relational perspective on value can be always recast in terms of utility. We address this elsewhere, but see generally Noah M Lemo, Intrinsic Value (Cambridge: 1994), and http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2653805?uid=3739696&uid=308824283&uid=2&uid=3&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21103376308817. An interesting paper on a related subject is Jeffrey Friedman (2013) “Freedom Has No Intrinsic Value: Liberalism and Voluntarism”, Critical Review 25 (1) 38-85. It is very unlikely that a either sober Lemos or a sober Friedman would agree with our thesis regarding intrinsic value.

** “Fabric” of “lives” is metaphorical, of course, and a bit airy-fairy, but the nonsense of the phraseology is compounded by Mr johnson concretizing that metaphorical fabric by referring to it as ‘physical’.

So, what physical fabric was destroyed? We presume that buildings – no doubt unsafe, if not positively squalid – were knocked-down, and the ancestral temple has not been preserved with the hoped-for diligence and enthusiasm. (Although lack of maintenance seems not to be tantamount to destruction, putting the words ‘destroy’ and ‘temple’ into contextual neighbourhood does effectively raise hackles.) Just in case the phrase destroyed the physical fabric of their lives makes a lick of sense at all, we do not think it it is an apt characterization of what is happening here. Whether the NYT spins the demolition of buildings and luke-warm historical preservation efforts as physical fabricide or as urbanization, surely it is for the locals themselves to say whether the changes to their village are on the whole positive or otherwise. We have little insight on that head based on the conversation Mr Johnson reports having had with Mr Lei; but having had many similar conversations with Chinese villagers over the past 14 years, it is more likely that Mr Lei is non-plused about matters than that he is deeply aggrieved. We doubt also whether one Mr Lei may speak for or on behalf of the entire village — something which should surely be offensive to the NYT’s egalitarian and democratic sentiments.

The growing frequency in metro-Middle Kingdom of fairly open, uncloseted female companions and intimates (in the big cities, these kind of pairbondings, many experimental and temporary, are now positively fashionable, if not culturally-approved) might ensure Ellen gets a healthy reception.

And maybe Metan Development Group was banking on that.

From another angle, the departure of both Garnier and Revlon from China might explain in part why Metan Development Group punted the show. Ms DeGeneres is a model for Covergirl (Proctor&Gamble), which has been kicking around the Middle Kingdom since 2005.